SharePoint Search and Duplicate Search Results

In this blog post I will address the differences in the display of duplicates between SharePoint 2010 and 2013. One of our customers was using a SharePoint 2013 site to store emails in SharePoint using the OnePlaceMail plugin from one of our partners Scinaptic. SharePoint Search classified a lot of these emails (RE and FWD) as duplicates.

There are some key differences in how SharePoint 2013 shows duplicates as opposed to SharePoint 2010. I created a Document Library which contains six emails. When I search for these emails SharePoint 2013 only shows me two results:

In SharePoint 2013 you can edit the search results WebPart to display the “View Duplicates Link”.

This option enables a link in the Hover Panel. Clicking this link will show you all “duplicates”.

Our customer did not like this extra step, but at first glance, there is no option to show all results in one windows without filtering duplicates. When we compare this to SharePoint 2010 Search Results we see some key differences.

I recreated the document library and uploaded the same emails in SharePoint 2010. A search for the word ‘email’ shows us four results. So SharePoint 2010 determines duplicates differently than SharePoint 2013 but we still got one result with duplicates.

Immediately we can see that the Show Duplicates link is available from the search results without hovering over search results.

When we edit the Search Results WebPart we can disable the “Remove Duplicates Results”.

When we disable this option. SharePoint Display’s all search results regardless of whether these are duplicates or not.

So… is there a way to set this in SharePoint 2013? Well… not from within the WebPart Properties pane but there is a way…

First export the current Search Results WebPart.

Open the WebPart in Notepad.

Search for the TrimDuplicates attribute:

Save and import the WebPart.

Replace the current results WebPart on you results page whit the imported one.

When you now search for ’email’ SharePoint 2013 will show you all six results.